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The deadline for expiry of United Steelworkers Local 6500's collective agreement has been extended from May 31 until June 5 -- five days after a two-month production shutdown is set to begin at Vale Inco Ltd.'s Ontario operations.

Contract negotiations will also continue until that date.

Wayne Fraser, director of Steelworkers' District 6 Ontario and Atlantic Canada, said Thursday that the union "wanted that shutdown to start before the contract talks were finished," although he did not wish to say why.

Fraser said Steelworkers proposed extending their current collective agreement for a full year "to get rid of this recession stuff. But there was no willingness to do that" on Vale Inco's part.

Vale Inco spokesman Cory McPhee said Thursday night that many ideas "get proposed across the bargaining table. In this case, we're not going to speak to specifics of what gets discussed at the table.

"But I can tell you that our commitment has been from the beginning to get a new collective bargaining agreement negotiated," said McPhee.

Fraser said the union proposed the one-year contract extension in the best interests of union members and the community.

"We would have kept the same contract for next year, just extended it and the COLA (cost of living allowance) would have he said.

Fraser has been involved in bargaining since it began April 7. A good deal has happened since then. Vale Inco announced a two-month production shutdown April 16, scheduled for June 1-July 27.

May 7, it announced it was cutting or moving human resources, finance and procurement jobs out of Sudbury, although it is too early to say how many.

Contact talks, which are down to the wire, are "moving slowly, very, very slowly," said Fraser.

Local 6500 members held a strike mandate vote Thursday, intended to give their bargaining committee a strong show of support. The results of that vote will be available Friday.

Vale Inco was scheduled to present its full proposal -- both monetary and non-monetary -- to Steelworkers' bargaining committee today.

"It will go from there," said Fraser. "Hopefully ... there is a willingness to move quicker, hopefully to get a deal by June 5. We've got to get back before the fifth because we've got to meet with our membership, we've got to have a vote, all those things come into play."

Fraser said contract negotiations generally start out slowly and pick up speed closer to deadline.

"Bargaining's bargaining. It's slow until the last two weeks ... when things happen in any set of negotiations. This is a different set of negotiations because we've got a different master now. So there's a whole bunch of twists and turns," he said.

Historically during contract negotiations, the former Inco Ltd. and Local 6500 applied for conciliation together.

Before a union can strike or an employer can lock out workers, they must apply for conciliation through the Ministry of Labour.

This time, Vale Inco and the union applied for conciliation separately.

Each met with a conciliator, who filed a no-board report necessary before a strike or lockout. That report was issued May 19, putting the parties in a legal strike/lockout position 17 days later.

Fraser said the applications for conciliation weren't filed to coincide with the May 31 end of the current three-year contract.

"The application was made by the employer. We didn't do a joint application."

Despite the five-day extension on this collective agreement, Fraser said the expiry date for future contracts will remain May 31.